Top 50 Albums of 2006

2006 wasn't easily characterized by distinct seismic shifts in independent music's ever-changing topography, or by a select handful of burgeoning new genres. Instead, it was a year of true independence, in which listeners pursued broader palettes, spread music by word of mouth, and openly welcomed increasingly forward-thinking approaches to songcraft.

Even the artists seemed to approach the new year as a clarion call to abandon tradition and realize their own unusual visions: From Joanna Newsom's feudal harp odysseys and Scott Walker's claustrophobic night terrors, to the Knife's raven-black horror house and Boris' juggernaut grind, 2006 was a banner year for boundary-breaking. And yet, between 60s girl group revivalism, lovesick Swedish pop, and more homemade, meat-and-potatoes indie rock than anyone knew what to do with, perfect, chiseled melody remained the magnetic force that kept us crawling back for more.

And it's not over yet. Or at least, not quite: For those who didn't find exactly what they were looking for, or those who simply aren't content to quit exploring, Pitchfork closes out the year with its annual list of the year's finest full-lengths. Dig deep: The best may be yet to come...

50: Booka ShadeMovements
[Get Physical]

Between the hyperreal clarity of its production, the friendliness of its arrangements, and the diversity of its stylistic detours, Movements may have been the most deliberately inviting of 2006's dance albums. There's something intuitively dead-on about the German duo's exquisite production, the way their sinuous melodies and weedy synth riffs slide like plasma over the surface of their thick grooves, as if all recent German house and techno had been distilled into a single, charming sonic signature. True to the duo's restless form, Movements intermingled rousing anthems with atmospheric curios, but it's when the duo go in for the kill with expansive emotional juggernauts like the trance-inflected "Darko" and "In White Rooms" that enthusiastic comparisons to Orbital or Underworld suddenly make perfect sense. --Tim Finney

49: Ellen Allien & ApparatOrchestra of Bubbles
[Bpitch Control]

More assured than Ellen Allien's solo work and more immediate than Apparat's, Orchestra of Bubbles is at heart a pop album, albeit one cloaked in techno's urgency. With both artists working at their moody best, the Bpitch Control label's typical stridency is tempered by an uncommon attention to warm, electro-acoustic sounds-- resonant strings, harpsichords, voices and analog synthesizers. Despite nominally four-to-the-floor cadences, Allien and Apparat layer long phrases in a way that creates a sense of suspended animation, with morphing tones extending to the horizon in undulating waves-- with the exception of one dubstep-inspired cut and Apparat's bashful foray into balladry, both of which usefully break up the record's horizontal sprawl. The whole album, ragged at the edges and bloody with tone, is swollen in the best way, and it crests from peak to peak across 13 tracks that are at once meditative and eruptive. --Philip Sherburne

48: The Long BlondesSomeone to Drive You Home
[Rough Trade]

The racks are cluttered with promising albums from British post-punk bands boasting charismatic singers, needling guitar work, and hollow, driving drums. But what separates the Long Blondes' debut album is lush-voiced frontwoman Kate Jackson's dexterity in exploring the complexities of women's relationships with other women. You'd have to reach back to the halcyon days of riot grrrl to find the subject probed this deeply. On songs like "Once and Never Again" and "Heaven Help the New Girl", Jackson is the wise survivor counseling her young, naïve sisters; on "Giddy Stratospheres" and "In the Company of Women" she competes for male affection; on "Separated by Motorways" she celebrates girl friendship. Turns out Jackson shares more with a certain Charlie's Angel than just a name. --Amy Phillips

47: MatmosThe Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
[Matador]

Physical objects have always played a central role in Matmos' music. On The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Pitchfork contributor Drew Daniel use their typically esoteric collection of materials-- teeth, cigarettes, typewriters, a cow's digestive tract-- as instruments to embody their various biographical subjects. The album's resulting "sound portraits" draw links between cultural figures like novelist Patricia Highsmith, punk rocker Darby Crash, and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not that any of these high-concept reconstructions would matter much if listening to this record was not such an absolute blast. Tracks like the space-age surf instrumental "Solo Buttons for Joe Meek" or the mutant disco of "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan" are entrancing even when heard apart from their contextual sources, and ambitious musique concrète narratives like "Rag for William S. Burroughs" are crafted with enough microscopic detail to foster endless fascination. Though directly animated by its two creators and 10 iconoclastic subjects, this brilliant and deceptively cohesive album contains multitudes. --Matthew Murphy

46: M. WardPost-War
[Merge]

M. Ward is the kind of guy who seems to sneak his way onto lists like this year in and year out-- but he deserves it every time. Post-War is a move away from lo-fi intimacy that finds Ward entering a more polished widescreen world in which his guitar virtuosity lends itself as ably to ragged fuzz riffs as it does to delicate acoustic duets. Yet even with the big arrangements and production, he still sounds like your friend singing you a song. That comfortable, gravelly croak is one of the most disarming voices out there, and it's never sounded better than it does on "Chinese Translation", a song you could throw a thousand adjectives at without getting it quite right. --Joe Tangari

45: Camera ObscuraLet's Get Out of This Country
[Merge]

"You're not a teenager," sang Tracyanne Campbell on Camera Obscura's 2003 album, Underachievers Please Try Harder. And on follow-up Let's Get Out of This Country, she no longer acts like one. With percussionist/singer John Henderson now out of the picture, Campbell takes on full vocal duties, her sweetly crestfallen presence giving a cozy glow to organ-glitzed ballads about loneliness, yearning, and Lloyd Cole. The band's sound has grown up, too, leaving behind song-for-song influence-spotting to pour Northern Soul shimmy, country melancholy, and twee-pop bookishness into a single, half-empty glass. "I don't believe in true love, anyway," Campbell sighs. Point is, she's lying. --Marc Hogan

44: The PipettesWe Are the Pipettes
[Memphis Industries]

The Pipettes admit they were a concept before they were a band. The polka dots, the dancing, and the re-appropriation of 1960s pop were all apparently set before the band began writing songs. But if the songs came second in the band's grand scheme, they come first on We Are the Pipettes. With few exceptions, each one is polished, clever, and miraculously poppy. Whether singing about a boyfriend's "slightly unnerving" cleanliness, confessing to murderous thoughts brought on by envy, or considering ripping out a mother's spleen, the lyrics are slyly self-aware, offering cartoony twists on modern love. Meanwhile, producer Gareth Parton puts the uniformly excellent harmonies upfront while adding just the right amount of iPod-friendly, DIY-Spector flourishes underneath. Love or loathe their charming nostalgia, but navel-gazing backlashes are wasted on the Pipettes. --Ryan Dombal

43: Sonic YouthRather Ripped
[Geffen]

On Murray Street and Sonic Nurse, Jim O'Rourke pulled Sonic Youth out of a late-90s rut, spurring noise-rock jams that looked backward, forward, and somewhere in between. But even the biggest fan of those albums probably wouldn't deny craving a sequel to pop records like Goo and Dirty, and on their first post-O'Rourke effort, Sonic Youth offer exactly that: Twelve shiny, beefed-up rockers that funnel noise into melody at a level not seen since The Year Punk Broke. The surprise isn't so much that the quartet made this move, but that they pulled it off so sharply. There's hardly a wrong turn here, just reams of revved-up rock with all the classic pieces-- Kim Gordon's voice, Thurston Moore's writing, Lee Ranaldo's poetry, Steve Shelley's energy-- locked together as tightly as a jigsaw puzzle. --Marc Masters

42: MastodonBlood Mountain
[Reprise]

After going major label in the wake of 2004's epic masterpiece Leviathan, Mastodon could've gone melodic and recorded the metal Nevermind that many fans expected from them. Instead, the Atlanta quartet crawled even further into their death-gurgle aesthetic and still managed to churn out a transcendently violent opus. On first listen, Blood Mountain is a heaving, spitting, seething mass of throat-shredding screams and serrated riffage. And after listening a while, the details really begin to creep out, like the scrabbling pseudo-jazz noise-boxes at the beginning of "Bladecatcher" or the way Brann Dailor's drums tumble all over themselves in a flurry of speed but still manage to find their own pocket. Throughout, the band walks a thin line between technical complexity and outright brutality, never letting one overwhelm the other. There's also a vaguely mythical storyline about a mountain populated by one-eyed sasquatches and blood-sucking flies, if you're into that sort of thing. This is metal, after all. --Tom Breihan

41: The DecemberistsThe Crane Wife
[Capitol]

The melodies are grand but stalwartly hummable, and Colin Meloy finds surprising soulful inflections in his reedy voice. Proggy epics blur seamlessly into poppy jangles, successfully drawing an implausible line between Jethro Tull and R.E.M. Meloy revisits a number of his favorite themes-- star-crossed lovers on "O Valencia"; imperiled children on "Shankill Butchers"-- but by drawing them together under the Japanese myth of the Crane Wife, he creates a more cohesive album than his erstwhile period pastiches. His well-heeled diction remains intact, but it's tempered now, more concerned with artfully framing the album's emotional payload than attempting to work turn-of-the-20th-century jargon into rhymed couplets. The Decemberists have always been an interesting band, but with The Crane Wife, they became a great one, and they did it without shedding an ounce of their oddball charm. --Brian Howe